Deconstruction in Qohelet: A Response to Mark Sneed

1. Introduction

Recent decades have seen a number of post-modern styled readings of the book of Ecclesiastes. For instance, Timothy Beal's essay, ‘C(ha)osmopolis: Qohelet's Last Words’, finds in the poem in Eccl. 12.1–7 an attempt to bring to the surface a vision of decay and disorder, in contrast to the stable and ordered cosmos of Torah piety and traditional wisdom. ¹ According to Beal, Qohelet attends in this poem to a chaos which other parts of the Hebrew Bible may exclude. Beal notes the apocalyptic touches to the poem, drawing a connection between these and Derrida's somewhat different definition of ‘apocalypse’ as a disjuncture in the ordinary fabric of life which opens the possibility of justice. Yvonne Sherwood's discussion of the same passage proceeds in a similar direction as she reflects on the longing for finality within modern biblical scholarship—and the subtle way Qohelet expresses similar longings without, perhaps, fulfilling them. ² Several other studies explore affinities between postmodern thought and the book of Ecclesiastes. ³

Within this sub-genre of scholarly work on Ecclesiastes, Mark Sneed has distinguished himself somewhat by attempting to deconstruct Qohelet. Sneed is, of course, sensitive to a kind of kinship between Qohelet's text and certain emphases in postmodern thought; in fact, he reads Qohelet as dissecting and de-stabilizing some central aspects of traditional Israelite wisdom. But Sneed also detects in Qohelet an unwillingness to deconstruct every traditional wisdom dichotomy. Accordingly, Sneed turns deconstructive methods against Qohelet himself. This argument is made more fully in an article in this journal, ‘(Dis)closure in Qohelet: Qohelet Deconstructed’, ⁴ and echoed in his later book, The Politics of Pessimism in Ecclesiastes: A Social-Science Perspective. ⁵

Sneed's approach is highly suggestive, but certain aspects of Derrida's presentation of ‘deconstruction’ are not very well represented. This, in turn, leads to some unconvincing interpretations of Qohelet. I will summarize Sneed's argument in his article and book, offering some reflections on the practice of deconstruction along the way. This study will close with a brief attempt to ‘deconstruct’ Qohelet in a way significantly different from Sneed's, by witnessing to tensions within the text rather than imposing criteria from outside.

2. Critical Analysis of Sneed's Deconstruction of Qohelet

In his earlier article, Sneed applies deconstruction theory to Qohelet in two main movements. First, Sneed follows Qohelet's interrogation of traditional retribution theology in passages such as 9.11, 8.14, and 7.15–18, arguing that Qohelet is rejecting the traditional belief (expressed in Proverbs) that blessing attends righteousness and vice-versa. According to Sneed, the distinction between the righteous and wicked disintegrates in 7.15–18: ‘Qohelet shows how its formulation deconstructs’. ⁶ If Qohelet had left the matter there and simply denied any doctrine of retribution, Sneed claims that ‘we could rightly label him a true Deconstructionist’. ⁷ But Sneed detects in Qohelet an unwillingness to follow his insights on this common wisdom theme to their natural conclusion. This is because the book still insists on the retribution principle (e.g., 11.9; 12.14), a proper time in which to act (3.1–8; 8.5–6), and the superiority of wisdom to folly (2.13–14). Qohelet questions the doctrine of retribution but cannot seem to reject it.

Sneed argues that retribution and the cosmic order it implies are ‘the standard sapiential form of presence’, which connects correct behavior and consequence under God's hand. ⁸ According to Sneed, Qohelet uses the phrase ‘fear of God’ to describe the way humans connect with this order (3.14; 5.6; 7.18; 8.12–13; 12.13). ⁹ It is, for Qohelet, a type of piety ‘that is open to God's elusive ways’, discerns order only in general ways, and avoids any kind of extreme behavior by being moderate in all things, even piety. ‘Essentially, one responds to God as one would an arbitrary despot.’ ¹⁰ As Qohelet articulates the meaning of the fear of God in his text, however, Sneed sees a simple restatement of the traditional wisdom distinction between wisdom and folly by Qohelet in a revamped form—a form which is just as vulnerable to deconstruction as the form found in Proverbs. ¹¹ For all the book's vigorous questions, Sneed sees in Qohelet an unwillingness to ‘decenter’ wisdom by denying its superiority to folly (2.15). ¹² Qohelet will reject the kind of piety and the blessings promised to it recommended in Proverbs, but not his own.

A second stage in Sneed's argument follows Qohelet's search for order and knowledge, noting the predominance of such terms as ‭אצמ‬, ‘find’, ‭שרד‬, ‘seek’, ‭עדי‬, ‘know’, and ‭האר‬, ‘see’, in the text. For Sneed, this reflects Qohelet's desire to ‘master the cosmos’ and make sense of it. ¹³ Sneed sees this mastery disrupted, however, by the presence of the feminine in 7.25–29. Without dismissing the interpretative complexities of this passage, Sneed detects in it a misogyny which reflects Qohelet's failure to subordinate the woman within his intellectual system. The only mastery of the world available to Qohelet is one which excludes ‘the feminine as a possible source of wellbeing’. ¹⁴ Sneed closes his article with a discussion of two aporiai in the book (ruptures in the text which it unsuccessfully tries to cover): the negative portrayal of dreams in Eccl. 5.2, 6 as opposed to the positive role in the career of King Solomon (1 Kgs 3.5), ‘the patron and hero of Israelite Wisdom’, ¹⁵ and the ambiguity in the use of the root ‭לכש‬, ‘insight’, in 1.17 in relation to the similar form ‭לכס‬, ‘folly’ (cf. BHS note 17c). ¹⁶

There are a few points where Sneed integrates this line of thinking into his longer investigation of the significance of Qohelet's (reconstructed) social location in The Politics of Pessimism in Ecclesiastes. Sneed is concerned that the social location and function of Ecclesiastes be given full weight, understanding Qohelet's attack on traditional wisdom and appeal to life's incongruities to be motivated by a scribe in Ptolemaic Judah wrestling with the failure of traditional wisdom and attempting to maintain his social standing in a difficult political situation. ¹⁷ Ecclesiastes is, on this reading, a kind of survival strategy for scribes in their particular social context in Ptolemaic Judah. ¹⁸ Qohelet's pessimism is not indicative of some inner pathology but a coping strategy which legitimates the status quo. ¹⁹ As part of this larger argument, Sneed quotes his earlier article, repeating his contention that Qohelet understands traditional wisdom dichotomies to blur in the face of death, but that Qohelet will not surrender his dichotomy between God-fearers and non-God-fearers. ²⁰ Qohelet's less rigid version of a wisdom theodicy is ‘more flexible, vaguer, and, thus, truer to reality’ ²¹ —the reality being, in this case, Judah's rule by a foreign power. Other scattered references to deconstruction continue the impression that Sneed understands it as essentially destructive—to deconstruct is to ‘question the feasibility’ of traditional wisdom's ‘values’ and ‘methodology’ ²² or ‘debunk’ them. ²³

Sneed's work in this area is an important and thoughtful contribution to postmodern readings of Ecclesiastes. I believe it is vulnerable to criticism on two counts, however: the application of deconstructive theory to the text and the exegetical conclusions drawn. With regard to the former, Sneed's article applies important concepts in Derrida's writing to Qohelet as one would apply any method to a biblical book: in the early pages of his article, he introduces his subject, surveys relevant literature, defines his terms, and brings them to bear on the text. It is certainly difficult to object to the application of a clearly formulated method to a biblical text. The trouble is that Derrida insists that deconstruction is not a method—not in the ordinary sense, at least. ‘Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one’, ²⁴ because such a formulation of deconstruction would assume a stable origin, which would then be vulnerable to deconstruction. ²⁵ In fact, Derrida writes that, in order to define ‘deconstruction’ precisely, one would have to invoke categories, concepts and predicates which themselves are subject to the same destabilizing process. ²⁶ Deconstruction is not a monolithically consistent, stable, predefined set of techniques which a critic applies to a text. Rather, according to Derrida, texts and traditions contain instabilities which tend to rise to the surface. Instead of the application of a stable set of procedures by a critic to a text, deconstruction has more to do with attending to the instabilities making up the text, or bearing witness to them. ²⁷ It is a way of reading which allows these instabilities to rise to the surface. Only in this loose sense can it be called a ‘method’.

The particular form these instabilities take can be explored a little further by turning briefly to the relationship between deconstructive theory and Sausserian linguistics. As has been discussed extensively elsewhere, ²⁸ De Saussure posited an arbitrary relationship between sign and signified: meaning in language is not derived by means of accurate and verifiable reference to a stable world independent of language, but by means of differences between signs within one particular linguistic system. There is no stable anchor outside of language, no Absolute (what Derrida calls a ‘transcendental signified’), which takes on meaning by itself, independent of language and determining ahead of time how a language works. ²⁹ From this perspective, it is hard to imagine what else could render words and clauses in a language meaningful except their difference from other words and clauses.

An important consequence of this understanding of language is that the different terms which render any one term meaningful always attend that one term even when they are not being used. The surrounding signs which render any one element in a language meaningful by their difference from it need not be explicitly present when that element is being used—but that one element forever depends on them in order to be meaningful. The other signs which any one sign ‘excludes’ by defining itself in opposition to them are necessary for the sign to be meaningful. ‘The structure of “presence” is thus constituted by difference and deferment’ ³⁰ because a sign is not ‘a homogeneous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end (meaning)’, but is ‘always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such’. ³¹

According to this line of argument, just as with individual signs, the supposedly stable and self-contained identity of persons, texts, institutions, and practices contains traces of what they define themselves in opposition to. These traces of the opposite, of what is excluded and relegated ‘outside’, still exert influence. The meaning of signs and texts is thus unstable because they are continually defined by their opposite. They tend to rely on what they exclude. It is these instabilities which deconstruction attends to. Since these instabilities are at work in the very language of the text itself, ‘deconstruction’ as a ‘method’ witnesses to tensions already at work in a text instead of applying an independently defined procedure to it. In Derrida's words,

This is probably part of the reason why Derrida gives the impression of being so lackadaisical in naming his own ideas. For example, in an interview with François Ewald, Derrida says he prefers to speak of ‘deconstructions’ in the plural as ‘one of the possible names to designate … what occurs, or cannot manage to occur, namely a certain dislocation, which in effect reiterates itself regularly—and wherever there is something rather than nothing’. ³³ It is probably also why Derrida has vehemently expressed his dissatisfaction with some North American ‘deconstructionists’ who simply apply one more ideology to the text—an ideology which is itself unstable—instead of letting the text deconstruct itself. ³⁴

It is, of course, possible to object at this point that Derrida has made deconstruction ‘unfalsifiable’ in his flat denial of its status as one more method among many. In other words, Derrida's denial might appear to make deconstruction suspiciously beyond objection, because it can always be claimed that deconstruction is different from what is being objected to. And surely it cannot be denied that, whatever else it is or is not, deconstruction is a certain way of reading that tends to produce certain kinds of results. The present article is not written as an apology for deconstruction (within the postmodern readings of Ecclesiastes listed above, some level of acceptance of deconstructive thought is assumed), but we can perhaps best understand Derrida's claim that deconstruction is not a method by emphasizing the distinction between, on the one hand, a stable set of procedures which are settled before reading, and on the other, an attempt to witness to internal tensions in different texts which will necessarily remain flexibly and (in a sense) unpredictable according to the different texts being read. (To make this distinction is not to denigrate the former kinds of methods, only to explicate the difference between them and a deconstructive reading.) In other words, just as each text's internal tensions will be unique, so a reading which attends to them will have to be careful not to define itself too precisely ahead of time. Whether or not or to what extent this qualifies a deconstructive approach as a method in the usual sense is not clear, at least to the present author, and perhaps not crucial to answer (this is why ‘method’ is put in quotations at a number of points in this essay). Perhaps it might also be pointed out that Derrida does not isolate or quarantine ‘deconstruction’ from any objection. According to Derrida, ‘deconstruction’ will, to an extent, be caught up in its own momentum: ‘the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work’. ³⁵ It is not a stable center which produces instabilities in texts, but is itself within those instabilities. Some may regard this as a strike against deconstruction, but I believe it will yield a very interesting perspective on an ancient text.

Returning to Sneed's reading of Ecclesiastes: it is difficult to avoid the impression that Sneed's deconstruction is the application of a (putatively) stable ideology to the text, a destruction from the outside. Sneed gives the impression that deconstruction amounts to rendering an idea unbelievable: as quoted above, he claims that a flat denial of retribution would have allowed us to ‘label’ Qohelet ‘a true Deconstructionist’. ³⁶ (Given Derrida's own articulation of ‘deconstruction’, this phrasing is unfortunately ironic.) A comment later in the article confirms this impression: noting the presence of a cause-and-effect dichotomy in the doctrine of retribution, Sneed declares that ‘Nietzsche is famous for deconstructing this dichotomy’. ³⁷ However much we might need to assume it in some situations, after Nietzsche (according to Sneed), nobody can really believe that anymore. Similarly, Sneed's ‘deconstruction’ of Qohelet is an attempt to render some central claims in Ecclesiastes unbelievable—to show that they are incoherent or contradictory. But this amounts to imposing an artificial uniformity on Ecclesiastes which does not accord well with Derrida's articulation of ‘deconstruction’, even though Derrida is cited a number of times. ³⁸

This variance from Derrida's own articulation of ‘deconstruction’ perhaps explains the unsatisfying reading of Qohelet by Sneed. At two points in particular, Sneed's ‘deconstruction’ amounts to simplifying Qohelet's thought and then criticizing the result.

First, Sneed claims that the predominance of verbs such as ‭אצמ‬, ‘find’, and ‭עדי‬, ‘know’, in Ecclesiastes reflects Qohelet's mastery of the world, an intellectual conquest frustrated only by woman, whom Qohelet hates because he cannot organize and thus subdue her. ³⁹ Qohelet will make some strong epistemic claims—there are things he is certain of—but Sneed fails to mention that many of the uses of these verbs emphasize Qohelet's self-confessed failure to understand. Many of the uses of ‭אצמ‬, for instance, describe the things Qohelet cannot find (3.11; 7.14, 24, 28; 8.17). 7.26–28 is especially striking in this regard, because four claims to ‘find’ something are mixed with two claims not to find something. In this passage, at least, finding and not finding seem to be bound up with each other. ⁴⁰ Qohelet's use of ‭עדי‬ is the same. On the one hand, Qohelet achieves knowledge in 1.17; his wisdom stands with him (2.9) in his building projects in 2.1–11; he is also certain that there is nothing better than to enjoy life in 3.12. But Qohelet is simultaneously flummoxed by an inscrutable future in 6.12 and finds God's work impenetrable in 8.17. In a similar way, Qohelet is certain that God will bring the young man into judgment in 11.9, but this certainty is set in the context of Qohelet's ignorance of any future success (11.6) or failure (v. 2) as God works unpredictably in all things (v. 5). ⁴¹ In no way can Qohelet be said to have mastered the world intellectually. He makes this failure explicit in his text.

The relationship of Qohelet's certainties and uncertainties can be explored a little further, for the close proximity of these opposing claims appears more than accidental. An especially significant example of this is found in 7.23: ‘All this I tested by wisdom. I said, “I am wise”, but it was far from me.’ In one sense, Qohelet achieved wisdom; in another, he did not. Fox surveys different interpretations of this verse which attempt to define this difference and concludes that, while Qohelet was knowledgeable and a skilled observer and thinker, the rationale behind the world's events—all that God does, from beginning to end (3.11; 8.17), including the exceptions to the law of retribution (8.14)—eludes him. ⁴² This implies that Qohelet's large-scale failure to grasp the world intellectually forms the context or horizon for his smaller achievements in wisdom. He is able to labor skillfully (2.3, 9), but not secure permanently the results of his wise labor (2.15–17). He is certain that there is nothing better than to rejoice in life and do good (3.12), but only because humankind cannot find out what God is up to ‘from beginning to end’ (3.11). Qohelet's larger ignorance about the meaning and rationale for the world's events forms the basis for his conviction that we should enjoy life now. Qohelet's mixture of certainty and ignorance is mutually self-defining. The few certainties he enjoys rest on the things he does not and cannot understand. This is a point to which we will return.

A second artificial imposition of uniformity in Sneed's account of Qohelet is found in his discussion of Qohelet's relationship to traditional retribution theology. A contrast between the status of retribution in Ecclesiastes and a book like Proverbs is, of course, undeniable, especially with regard to the kind of life the wise person can expect under the sun (compare, e.g., Prov. 10.9; 11.31; 12.21; 13.21; 19.21 with Eccl. 7.15; 8.14; 9.11–12). But Proverbs is also entirely aware that the wicked are often rich, and the righteous often needy and vulnerable (10.2–3; 11.4, 7, 16; 13.23; etc.). Why else would the warning of Prov. 3.31 need to be given? The deferral of the full presence of the blessings of wisdom in Proverbs is glossed over in Sneed's reading. This, in turn, complicates the way in which Qohelet interacts with the wisdom tradition. ⁴³

Sneed understands Qohelet to reject certain simplistic versions of the retribution principle, but to refuse to reject the principle outright; although Qohelet is openly pained by the many situations in which retribution is absent, he will not surrender his belief in it (e.g. 8.11–14). Sneed sees in this paradoxical position the re-assertion of a sapiential version of full presence, a wisdom form of a transcendental signified or fixed, stable center—a re-assertion which is as vulnerable as the forms of retribution which Qohelet rejects. But in Qohelet's discourse, the ‘presence’ of divine judgment is anything but fully realized. He openly admits that judgment is often absent. Qohelet will counsel his readers more than once that they cannot plan their lives around any safe expectation of retribution or a stable connection between deed and consequence (e.g. 5.12; 7.13–14; 9.11). ⁴⁴ His perception and description of divine judgment is rather a deferral and delay of any full presence of divine justice. Qohelet's refusal to surrender the retribution principle, together with his open admission of the many ways in which justice is not accomplished, creates a kind of presence-in-absence and absence-in-presence. If Qohelet had given up on all forms of retribution—if he had claimed divine judgment was entirely absent under the sun—this would not prove that he was a ‘true Deconstructionist’; it would only represent one more dogma which would be vulnerable to subversion. Furthermore, in anticipation of the discussion below, one might take a step further and draw attention to the way in which Qohelet explicitly joins his affirmations about divine justice to their opposite, to admissions of the absence of divine justice (see 3.16–21; 7.15–18; and 8.11–14). ⁴⁵ One almost gets the sense that Qohelet cannot state one without the other—almost as if, in Qohelet's discourse, these opposites depend on each other for formulation.

But to say this raises the possibility of a ‘deconstruction’ of Qohelet by attending to hidden dependencies and tensions within his text. How would a reading of Qohelet proceed which borrowed its subversive resources from the text itself? It should be pointed out that Sneed does write that Qohelet's concept of ‘God-fearing’ ‘feed[s] parasitically on its opposite to produce meaning. Though non-God-fearing is only once mentioned in the book (8.13), its presence is conjured at each space where God-fearing enters.’ ⁴⁶ This is an important insight, but Sneed does not explore how Qohelet's concept of the God-fearer is defined by its opposite. He states that it is so and moves on, without querying what this kind of piety might look like and what fearing God might mean, if it makes sense only in relation to its opposite of impiety.

3. ‘Deconstructing’ Qohelet: An Alternate Proposal

I would like to make a brief search for ‘deconstruction’ in Qohelet. This search takes its place along with other postmodern-styled readings of Qohelet listed above, except in that it specifically looks for instabilities which arise when claims are made which depend on what the text excludes in order to be meaningful. Space allows for only a short investigation of one such dependency which appears when 1.2–3 and 3.11 are brought together.

We may note that a certain dislocation occurs in the earlier passage when Qohelet draws a conclusion in 1.3 which, even if understandable, is neither necessary nor inevitable. When Qohelet asks after what ‭ןורתי‬, what ‘advantage’ or ‘profit’, ⁴⁷ a person has in all their labor under the sun, he seems to be searching for some permanent left-over (‭רתי‬) to a lifetime of labor. ⁴⁸ Qohelet does not absolutely deny any advantage or benefit to wisdom under the sun (2.13; 7.12; 10.10), nor does he deny any results to human effort at all; his use of ‭קלח‬, ‘portion’, indicates the real but temporary rewards which work brings (2.10, 21; 3.22; 5.17–18; 9.6, 9; 11.2). ⁴⁹ Yet almost all of the references to a person's portion (‭קלח‬) under the sun imply its impermanence. This is in contrast to ‭ןורתי‬, which refers to the permanent ‘left-over’, the lasting gain or benefit which humans tend to expect from our lifetime of labor (‭למע‬, 1.3; 2.11; 3.9; 5.15). The point is that, in 1.3, Qohelet insists that we have no permanent gain for all our efforts: whatever small gains are made along the way, we make no permanent impact on the world. In an important sense, we have nothing to show for our life's work: ‘A generation comes, a generation goes; the earth stands forever’ (1.4). Qohelet enjoyed amazing accomplishments during his life, and his joy in his work was his portion (‭קלח‬) from it (2.10)—but his joy sours as he realizes the tide of time will soon wash all his achievements away, so that he has no lasting gain (‭ןורתי‬, 2.11).

Qohelet's reaction to this state of affairs is to call it ‭לבה‬, ‘absurdity’ or ‘vanity’. The meaning of Qohelet's favorite word and its various modern translations have already received extensive discussions elsewhere. ⁵⁰ Without exhausting the various nuances and implications with which Qohelet will deploy his favorite word, we are on strong exegetical ground to see at least three meanings: Qohelet will name something ‭לבה‬ which is fleeting (e.g. 11.10), ‘in vain’ in the sense of failing to produce certain expected results (e.g. 1.14; 2.1, 11), ⁵¹ or absurd in the sense of being contrary to all reasonable expectation (2.15–17; 8.14). ⁵² Perhaps all three senses play some role in 1.2: our lives and labors are fleeting and vanish quickly, ‘in vain’ in that we aim but inevitably fail to make some permanent mark on the world through our work, and absurd because of the disproportion between the amount of work we do and our emotional investment in it, as opposed to the end result (1.11; 2.15–17). It should be emphasized that absurdity is not a quality inherent in things, but dependent on the expectation of an observer: only when reality contradicts expectations do we call something absurd. ⁵³ Qohelet reacts in exactly this way to his diagnosis of the human condition in 1.3. It contradicts his expectation that his work should have some permanent gain.

Qohelet's reaction to his diagnosis of life under the sun is understandable, but it is easy to imagine someone contemplating the same absurdities and drawing a different conclusion without any obvious contradiction. One might agree that death constitutes the final limit to all human accomplishment, and that however much someone might achieve in life, it is a matter of time before all one's work turns to dust and all visible evidence that one ever existed is erased. But our imagined interlocutor might shrug and say she never hoped for anything more—she might be entirely reconciled to the fact that there is no permanent gain to human labor. ⁵⁴ Qohelet does not seem to consider this possibility (for himself, at least). Why is he so securely unreconciled to a life which grants certain ‘portions’ (‭קלח‬) but no absolutely stable ‘profits’ or achievements (‭ןורתי‬)?

I believe the reason for Qohelet's conviction—a text which illuminates but does not resolve the dislocation in 1.2–3—can be found in 3.9–15, specifically with regard to this passage's most disputed word, the meaning of ‭םלע‬ in v. 11. Although it may not be common practice to base an argument on the more difficult verses in a biblical book, it is exactly these sorts of knots or bumps in the road to which deconstructive readings will be sensitive. A number of plausible interpretations have been offered: ⁵⁵ the ‭םלע‬ which God places in human hearts in v. 11 has been taken to mean ‘eternity’ (as in 12.5), ‘distant past’, ⁵⁶ ‘darkness’ or ‘ignorance’ (from the verb ‭םלע‬), ‘knowledge’ (from an Arabic root), ‘the world’ (with the LXX and the post-biblical meaning of the word), or emended to ‭למע‬, ‘labor’. ⁵⁷ Seow convincingly argues that ‭םלע‬ in v. 11 should be translated as ‘eternity’ on two grounds: the contrast between ‭וחע‬, ‘its time’, and ‭םלע‬, which implies that the latter speaks to what is outside specific times, and the use of ‭םלוע‬ elsewhere in the book to refer to what transcends particular times, most importantly to refer to the grave (2.16; 9.6; 12.5; but see also 1.4 and 3.14). ⁵⁸ The thought seems to be that while God binds human existence under the sun to certain times which we do not choose, but only respond to, he simultaneously places an impulse or desire inside us for something outside these times. Beautiful (or, as it is more often translated, ‘fitting’) as these times are, we long for something more (v. 11a). Koosed is unwilling to be quite so definite on this word, writing that ‘God has placed something so infinite or mysterious or troubling into finite flesh that no one can decide quite what it is, and every translation possibility leaves something lacking. Perhaps the indecidability is the point.’ ⁵⁹ However, she later speaks of ‘the infinite given to the finite’ in this verse, which suggests that her reading is not too different from that recommended by Seow. ⁶⁰

Allowing the word to stand as ambiguous and difficult, there are strong grounds for seeing in this verse a claim that something ‘outside’, something beyond the normal course of time, has been put in the human heart. That Qohelet makes this claim helps to explain why he reacts as he does in 1.2–3. If Qohelet thinks that God has put an impulse in the human heart for something beyond the successive ‘times’ (3.1–8) of our under-the-sun existence while simultaneously frustrating this impulse (3.11), so that human beings cannot decipher or make sense of God's work in human history, then it makes more sense why Qohelet would have difficulty reconciling himself to the labor which God gives to humanity (3.10) but which achieves nothing permanent (3.9). Qohelet's grasping after a permanent gain (‭ןודחי‬) forms something of a correlate to and result of the ‘eternity’ (‭םלע‬) within the human heart: just as ‘eternity’ stands outside of time, so Qohelet strives after a permanent gain which will endure through time.

If Qohelet's response of vanity and absurdity (1.2) to his description of the human condition (1.3) has been illuminated without being resolved by reference to 3.11, we can note that there is an important sense in which Qohelet's main thesis about the vanity and the brevity of life under the sun depends on its opposite to be meaningful—that is, what is ‘above’ the sun and outside of time. On the one hand, we see in Ecclesiastes a certain perspective on life under the sun as a good gift from God (2.24–26; 3.12; 5.17–20, etc.), but over quickly and plagued while it lasts by vanity and absurdity, that twistedness which God has imposed on human existence (1.15; 7.13). On the other hand, Qohelet gives us hints of what is ‘above’ the sun and outside of time: God's work, real but incomprehensible and unable to be affected by human beings (3.11; 8.17), which stands forever (‭םלע‬) when human labor does not. Qohelet's central claim about the one side of this dichotomy—not just that human labor entails no lasting profit, but that it is in vain and absurd—depends upon the existence and reality of the other side in order to make sense. If some dimension of reality outside of time did not exist—and if God had not left some trace or echo of that reality in the human heart—there does not seem to be any reason why Qohelet would interpret our brief lives under the sun as ‘in vain’ or ‘absurd’. If there were no echo in the human heart of some transcendent reality, why would it occur to Qohelet to strive after some enduring memorial which time and death cannot touch?

It thus appears that Qohelet's central claim depends on what is excluded to be meaningful. Qohelet will not say much about God's work ‘above the sun’ except that he cannot find it out; it is excluded from his discourse by necessity from his position ‘under the sun’. But his central thesis in 1.2 requires it. This does not imply that the meaning of Qohelet's text collapses, or that it can mean anything. It only implies a certain instability in the text, because Qohelet's claim depends on what it opposes to make sense. We thus see ‘deconstruction’ in Qohelet instead of the deconstruction of Qohelet from the outside.

In my opinion, a number of similar dislocations or paradoxical dependencies could be located in Qohelet. A few have already been suggested, such as Qohelet's mixture of certainty and incomprehension. I think Sneed is correct to point to the fear of God as another. ⁶¹ Especially in 7.15–18, it is not just not-fearing-God which defines its opposite category of fearing God, but the possibility of not-fearing-God as a successful way of life, which enjoys the benefits of long life which are supposed to attend a righteous life. It appears that the fear of God depends on the possibility not just of certain people refusing to do so, but enjoying wonderful lives as they do, in order for the fear of God to exist and function as Qohelet thinks it should. This is the case because if wickedness always obviously and quickly met with divine judgment, then a God-fearing life would have other motives than reverence and respect for God. It would turn out not to be the fear of God, but a desire for reward. Again, we see a theme in Qohelet which depends on its opposite in order to be meaningful.

4. Conclusion

The present study has attempted to witness to deconstruction in Qohelet rather than deconstructing Qohelet by applying a predetermined method to the text. Certainly not all the possibilities by which deconstruction might be witnessed in Qohelet have been exhausted. But it has been argued that deconstructive theory can be applied closely to the text without using that theory as a way to attack Qohelet. The present attempt to witness to tensions within Qohelet's discourse may open up new possibilities for postmodern-styled readings of Ecclesiastes and other biblical books.